


we have the stars (and this is given once only)

by merengue



Category: WTFock | Skam (Belgium)
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, Military AU, also sorry in advance for all the military stuff ive made up, i love sander can you tell, it doesnt matter because robbe loves him too, so so much, they’re disgusting really, woke up wrote this now going back to bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 02:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21236960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merengue/pseuds/merengue
Summary: he’s lying to himself, he knows. because sander is leaving and it hurts and, even then, there’s not a single universe in which he would’ve chosen not to have him here, his best friend, holding him this close for the last night in a very long time.





	we have the stars (and this is given once only)

Robbe remembers a lot of moments from when he was a child. He’s not sure if everyone does, if everyone has that clear-cut array of images always in the back of their head. The slam of the door when his father left for the last time, dinner going cold on the table, the watercolour of Antwerp turning blue when he got tired of waiting around and fell asleep, and woke still in the same place, with a chirp on his spine.

He has them, a lot. Bad memories. They pile up and hang heavy, but there are other things, there, too, along with the pain. The golden hue of the french beach they used to spend every Summer in, before things went bad. The smell of salt hours later lingering on his hair.

The best of them, it started like this.

Robbe knows he’s never been the extroverted kind. Even before, he never felt that spark inside, that need to share, to open his ribs to show the world so they could judge. He kept to himself, coloured always inside the lines.

The first time Simon Peeters picks on him, he’s ten years old and his father had just screamed at him before he got down from the car in front of the school.

In the beginning, it’s nothing. It should be nothing. A slight brush of shoulders, but Robbe can feel it, somehow, brewing. The next time it’s not so gentle, a leg that makes him trip and broken jeans that he sews in secret at home, just so his father doesn’t notice so he doesn’t yell at him. So he doesn’t know he’s not been good.

When they hit him for the first time, it should hurt, but then again it doesn’t, or at least not where it should. Robbe feels numb. The sting from his cheek has nothing on the beating of his heart.

He can see him, raising his fist again, ready to go and Robbe just, he just. He closes his eyes. He knows his father would scream at him to be a man, to defend himself, but his legs hurt from falling the day before and everyone is looking, and Robbe can’t muster the strength to stand. To bear his fears and pack them all in a punch.

Simon’s fist never hits his face again, and the moment Robbe opens his eyes, the boy is on the floor and someone different towers above him, half shadow, before he turns around, and.

He’s a boy. Tall. A boy, with a split lip now, and maybe Robbe takes a few seconds to wonder if he’s going to hit him, too. If he just wanted Simon out of the way.

That’s one of the things Robbe has never asked Sander, not in the eight years of friendship that began right there and then. Why had he helped him that day.

Maybe because he knows Sander would joke about the whole thing, maybe because he already knows the answer.

Ten-year-old Sander extends a hand towards him and helps him up, and Robbe has always remembered things from his childhood, so he will always remember the warmth that flooded his own hand, his arm, the center of his chest when he stood up. Like a little ball of light jumping around his bones.

Sander –_the_ _boy_, back then– was a closed book. He checked his face for bruises and ten seconds after he was gone, probably trying to run away from the teachers before he got caught, but Robbe sat down next to him in Arts next morning and Sander joked about his hair and if Robbe had to explain it, he would probably say it was then.

When Robbe-and-Sander began.

_Why did you help me, that day_?

Robbe doesn’t ask. In the end, he doesn’t know if it’s because he knows the answer or because he hates the question.

He knows he should’ve seen it coming. After all, Sander exists in a way no one has ever existed before.

He takes so much room. He glows and burns and everyone and everything has to take a couple of cautionary steps back, always, because he’s wild and impulsive and the best thing that has ever happened to Robbe, from that day on seventh grade onwards, a little light that burns when everything else goes to shit.

There’s plenty of stuff in Robbe’s life that doesn’t make sense. Sander doesn’t make sense, too, but even then it’s the only thing that feels like it does. Like he belongs somewhere in the world.

He still remembers it, ninth grade, ethics class and that big question written in the blackboard, taunting him with the edges of every word.

_What is your favorite thing in the world_?

Sander told him later he wrote about his mother’s Sunday pastries, shooting practice with his dad.

Robbe says he doesn’t remember, because his heart is hammering in his chest and he fears that, if he opens his mouth for too long a second, it’s going to jump out of his throat and latch onto Sander and never leave.

They’re riding home, yellow and blue bycicles at a slow pace, eating chocolate bars Sander had stolen right that morning. Chocolate and peanut just like Robbe likes them, even though he knows that Sander has always prefered the caramel ones.

_I_ _wrote_ _about_ _you_, he doesn’t say, while they joke and eat and Sander laughs, and his eyes crinkle like the edges of a star. _You’re_ _my_ _favorite_ _thing_ _in_ the _world_.

And god, he is. Among so many other things. Because Sander is irresponsible, never washes the dishes when Robbe stays over and needs to listen to Bowie and the Rolling Stones at top volume or else he says he’s going to die, and he’s harsh and rough around the edges, but at the same time –and Robbe sometimes wishes he didn’t know this, just so he could love him a little bit less–, he’s so impossibly, unbearably kind. He’s never selfish and always shares with Robbe every little thing he has, he gave him a piggy-ride two hours from the fair when Robbe twisted his ankle and he fights every and anyone who decides to even look badly at Robbe, because sometimes Sander is like a dog, too, because he’s loyal to little people, but those he protects he would protect them to death.

Robbe think he has always known it, deep inside. That the kaleidoscope of what makes his best friend be who he is was going to be the downfall of him one day.

He just never knew it would happen so fast.

The night Sander tells him for the first time he’s enlisted on the Army and he’s being deployed in two months, he’s nineteen and Robbe’s seventeen and the sky is still rosy, but Robbe can feel it, that same sky, crumbling to his feet.

Lybia, he says. Only three months.

It’s the first real fight in ages that they have. They banter over music, over photography, used to even banter over girls back then when Robbe hadn’t told him yet, but it’s never been like this. This raw. Like they’re ready to claw each other and hurt until they bleed.

In Sander’s room, after dark.

“I knew this hero complex of yours was huge, but not that it was going to get you killed-”

Sander stands up and he’s not much taller than Robbe, but suddenly he seems a million feet high.

“Are you even hearing yourself, Robbe? What I’m doing is good. I’m going to make good in the world. Fight for us”.

Robbe bites his lips, until he draws blood and tastes like rust.

“You’re not doing it to do good. You’re doing it because your ego could rival the fucking sun”.

_You’re too good. You’ve always been. _

_I knew this was coming and it’s still ripping my heart apart._

“Fuck you, Robbe. It’s not my fault you’ve been a coward since we were kids”.

And that. That stings. It burns like liquor down his throat and limbs and heart and Robbe hates himself, because he looks at Sander, messy silver hair that’s about to get cut off and locked jaw and that little mark above his eye that he got from getting Robbe out of a fight, and he thinks, _if I loved you anymore I might as well burst and join the fucking stars._

Antwerp turns blue behind the window, and Robbe is suddenly so tired. Because this is his boy, right here, his boy and he’s saying that he’s leaving and the only thing they’re doing is fight.

But Robbe knows he can’t help it, not right now, so he does the next best thing he can think of, and closes the door softly after he leaves.

It takes two days. Two torturous, agonizing days before he hears the knock on his window and there he is, slightly sweaty, wearing pajama pants and, god, maybe if he weren’t this beautiful. Clear-glass eyes, feline, frowned lips like he can’t bear seeing Robbe this sad.

Maybe Robbe could then love him without feeling this kind of hurt.

Sander slips beneath his covers and they do like any other time when things got too much and they needed to exist beyond the rules of the world, when Sander told him about his illness and Robbe told him that maybe, well, maybe he didn’t really honestly like girls in the ways he should.

Sander’s skin is warm, warm, warm against his own and Robbe has always thought it, but he thinks it again tonight.

_There’s no place on Earth I want to be if you can’t be with me._

Maybe that’s why he can’t understand Sander, even though he holds him so tight, just like he always does things, so tight it hurts. Maybe that’s why it stings. Because everyone leaves.

Sander was never supposed to leave, too.

“I’m sorry”.

It has always fascinated Robbe, the way Sander can manage sometimes to sound so unbearably soft. it’s a privilege, really, because away from this fortress of theirs Sander never lets his guard down. Never leaves anything bare, always keeping good care of all his blind spots.

Robbe likes to think that he feels it, too. That when it’s only the two of them here, the world could burn for all they care.

He turns around, stares at Sander’s profile bathed in moonlight, like silver slopes.

“I’m the one who’s sorry”, and it’s a miracle, really, because he was so so angry two days ago, but now the only thing he feels is raw and tender and ready to cry. “You’ve always loved it, helping people. A part of me always knew this was coming”.

He doesn’t say, _a part of me wishes you would’ve told me earlier, told me that first day of school so I could decide to never sit next to you and never become your best friend and feel this way, like I’m about to disappear._

He doesn’t say that, because it’s not true. Because, even if it ends up like this, he would choose Sander again and again and again.

“I’m not going into active combat, you know. It’s not going to be dangerous”.

Sander turns around softly, blankets rustling and maybe if someone could see, but no one can so Robbe lets their legs tangle in silence, gets closer so their noses almost brush, so he can feel rather than see the speckles of green in his eyes, the ones Robbe knows by heart already.

“I know”.

“It’s going to be okay”.

_Are you trying to convince me or yourself?_

“Okay”.

The room is electric blue, sizzling when Sander holds his arms open and Robbe lets himself be drowned in one of Sander’s hugs, face tucked in that place between his neck and shoulder that has always been reserved for him. His private place.

Robbe has seen him, kissing girls, but he’s never seen Sander hug people. Not like this –and if he has, he never wants to know. Sander is the one who’s fierce out of the two of them, but this, Robbe would bite any one to protect.

“Besides, it’s two months away still”, Sander says, soothing. “There’s plenty of chocolate bars we can steal and public property we can fuck up until then”.

“You’re fucking unbelievable, you know that, Driesen?”

He expects him to joke back, because Sander needs to always have the very last word, but he doesn’t even open his mouth. He hugs him tighter, hand in the small of his back.

Robbe feels like he could drown.

“Everything is going to be okay, Robbe. I promise”, and it’s there, feather-soft, a kiss on his forehead. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re never getting rid of me”.

Robbe burrows himself further under the covers, hides his face on Sander’s neck, because the only other option would be to cry.

He doesn’t want to cry, not in front of Sander. Not before he leaves. Robbe thinks that, the moment tears start flowing, he’s never going to be able to hold them back anymore.

—

Time is a relative concept, Robbe knows this well. A night can feel endless as well as unbeareably short, and isn’t it a fucked up concept alright. Time. Always too much of it, or too little.

The day Sander has to leave, Robbe feels like the two past months have been nothing but a haze. That it was yesterday that they slept together in bed, holding each other, just like any other time they had fought.

Sander is all dressed in green and his buzzcut feels feather soft beneath his fingers when he slides his hand through it, in front of the mirror at Robbe’s house.

Sander wanted him to do it. Not the army, not any shop in any corner of Antwerp. _I want it to be you, so I can take you with me._

If he had wanted to refuse, Robbe wouldn’t have even known where to start.

The airport is bustling with people, people running and people talking and for a moment, Robbe hates them all. Each and every fucking one of them, he wants them gone just so he can think, think of anything than where they are, where they are going, what it all means.

The moment they see them, the rest of the soldiers, Robbe feels his heart unraveling and fears it, for a moment, that it might pool at his feet like a pile of goo and never come back.

Sander turns around. Time shifts again, liquid, lasting a lifetime.

“I’m coming back, sooner than you think”.

His parents said goodbye to him at home. He should have done that, too, but Robbe has never been good at this self-preservation thing. Not when it’s them. Not when it’s about Sander.

“I know”, he says, and feels dumb instantly after because it must be the only thing he’s said in weeks.

A woman blurts from the speakers, someone calls him out, Sander, and Robbe doesn’t know shit about guns but he could kill them, each and every one right now, if only it meant Sander doesn’t have to leave.

_Please don’t leave don’t leave don’t leave._

“Robbe”.

It brings him out of his own head, snapping his eyes open. Sander is biting his lips and he seems on the verge of something, saying something. Robbe is not really sure that he wants to know what it is.

“Yeah?”

“It’s going to be okay, you know that, right?”, he says, draws him in for a hug that could break any dimension, jump through any space. “You’re my best friend. My person. There’s no one else I’d want to come home to”.

And it’s awful, because this is Sander Driesen in a nutshell, isn’t he, because he’s a bastard half of the time and he shouts and hates to follow rules, but god, his heart.

Robbe has never met someone that loves the same way in which he loves. Robbe has never wanted to kiss him this much.

_I love you. I love you. I love you._

He doesn’t know how to say it, he’s never known how, so he just hugs him back. Tight, so tight it could snap bones and it still wouldn’t feel nowhere close to what he needs.

Robbe turns around without looking back when he leaves, and the airport is full with people and noise but he can’t hear a sound that isn’t the absolute madness of his raw beating heart.

—

Ninety days. The minimum limit for deployment. That’s how long Sander is going to be gone, being the first time, but thinking of it makes Robbe think about how there could be other times, other deployments and times when Sander leaves without any kind of warrant, so he decides to shut it all down and not think about anything at all.

The first time they talk again, it’s through a grainy screen and everything’s blurry, but Robbe has never been so thankful for technology ever in his life. Sander looks good, he always looks good but this is an inside thing too, so Robbe tries to breathe, _he’s__ okay he’s okay he’s okay_, calm the wild drumming of his blood.

“The food here is terrible, god, I miss my mum’s cake. I even miss your fucking awful waffles”.

Robbe can’t help it. He laughs and it’s like a dam has been broken, like he’ll never be able to stop.

“I’m never making waffles for your ungrateful ass again. Not even if you’re dying from hangover”.

Sander rises his arms above his head, like he’s surrendering, but suddenly that little gesture reminds Robbe of where he is and the laughter dies right on the spot.

“God, I’ve missed you”, Sander says, eyes still crinkly. “I’ve missed your laugh”.

“It’s been only three days”.

_I’ve been missing you since the moment you told me you were going to leave._

“Have something against my clingy ass, Ijzermans?”

“Shut it, Driesen”.

It’s always been like this, between the two. Pulling and pushing and god, he has missed it, these past couple of days, feeling Sander’s energy like he’s under his own skin. Robbe talks to him about the news in town, about his last physics test and Sander doesn’t stop him, so he talks and he talks until Sander needs to leave, and then the image disappears and the screen goes black, and he’d never admit it but the world goes black, too.

—

It happens on the fifty-eight day. He’s been counting the days like he’s counting stars, staring at the open calendar each and every day.

That first time was the only one he got to see his face. Then it was all by phone, one call a day, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere. Nothing at all.

He remembers, the last call. Sander says I love you and Robbe doesn’t even wonder what kind of love it is, because he knows the answer already. It’s all the kinds of love. Each and every one, flapping its wings.

Robbe doesn’t know what to do now, how to wait. How to deal with it, all this silence. It’s so loud. He talks with mrs Driesen once in a while, drops by for a cup of coffee and some harmless talk, but today he’s there and the air feels like it’s made of glass.

It’s not him, who the army would call, after all. Mrs Driesen is Sander’s mum. Robbe is... He doesn’t even know who he is. Not someone relevant enough to get a call, maybe. It doesn’t matter because the moment Sander’s mum gets back from the kitchen, she has a hand over her mouth and the vertigo Robbe suddenly feels could kill him on the spot.

In the end, it goes like this.

They were scouting territory when the shooting began.

Two of the men were killed. Three are severely injured, and Sander. Sander. _Sander sander sander._

The bullet missed his neck by three centimeters, says Sofia, mrs Driesen and Sander’s mum and god, he can’t even hear her, almost, over the sound of blood rushing through his head. It missed his neck but lodged itself deep in his shoulder, and Robbe would like to ask so many things, _right or left one, god don’t let it be the right one and god let him be okay_, even though Robbe doesn’t even believe in god, and Sander doesn’t either.

He doesn’t ask mrs Driesen if Sander is still bleeding right now. Robbe knows he is. He can’t explain how but he knows, deep inside, and that’s their secret, isn’t it, in the end.

That what one of them feels, the other feels, so intensely and raw, like they are connected. That whenever Sander bleeds, Robbe is also bleeding too.

—

It takes fifty four hours to have more news. Fifty four hours and thirty something minutes and Robbe doesn’t sleep a wink, doesn’t even think of sleeping a wink. He’s taken residency on the Driesen’s couch and hasn’t even gone to school but it doesn’t matter, because how could he go. How could he.

“I love him”.

He doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until mrs Driesen’s face turns around, faces him with a look so unbearably soft he feels like he could cry.

Sander inherited her eyes, a whirlpool of green and blue and soft and fierce.

“Oh, honey”.

They don’t say anything more. Mrs Driesen hugs him so hard and it smells so much like home that Robbe breathes in, breathes out and lets the smell of lavender and soap lull him to a restless sleep.

—

  
It’s eighty-one hours later when they get the call.

Stable withing gravity, they say.

Being sent home. A week from now.

It’s all a mess of words, of complicated terms but he latches onto these both things and uses them to float, to breathe for the first time in weeks.

He smiles, feels relief like anesthesia on his blood and hopes for it, that Sander can feel it too, feel the calmness all the way through a thousand kilometers of distance, the way his heart is beating and beating and it sounds just the way his name would, if names could be spelt in the beats of one heart.

—

  
Time is tricky. Robbe knows that well. Two months can be endless but then a moment comes by that lasts even double, thrice that time, like sand has stopped falling from the clock. He’s standing up, waiting in a private train station next to Sander’s mum and dad and Robbe could swear the seconds are all melted, made of lead.

They’ve been waiting forty-two minutes for their boy, but Robbe thinks he could wait a thousand lifetimes if he had to, only to hold him again in his arms.

The first thing of all is the noise. First distant, then getting closer, the sound of wheels and movement and the shape of it, the train, chirped red paint.

When Sander steps down the stairs, helped by two soldiers on his side, the sand of the clock stops altogether and Robbe. Robbe _ knows_. That nothing could ever match this feeling, ever, in the history of the world, of the earth, of the galaxies that tether the universe.

The moment in which Sander looks at him, and he looks back, and everything shifts black like tectonic plaques in movement.

Robbe had imagined it, a thousand times. How it would be, when they met again. What he would say. What he would feel.

Everything seems so dumb, now, because Sander gets closer and there are no words, no need to speak. Sander looks rough and has his left arm splintered but they seek each other in the same way they’ve always done, like time is really meaningless and the important things in life never have to change.

Robbe is the first one to rise his arm. Slowly, he shifts forward and lets his hand rest softly on his face, traces Sander’s jaw upwards until the tip of his fingers is sliding through his cheeks. They’re a bit more hollow, a bit more tired, but his fingers still travel upwards and there it is, the same mark. On the side of his eye.

Sander’s eyes crinkle softly even though he still hasn’t opened them and Robbe can feel it, there, under the skin.

Robbe lets his hand drift down, just right on top of his heart, feeling its beat.

”I thought I was going to lose you”.

”For a moment there, I thought so too”.

Robbe hugs him so tight right there and then, like a force of nature and it doesn’t even take a split second for Sander to hug him right back.

If he drops his mouth to taste the beat on his throat, to feel it thrum on his lips and feel Sander alive, no one but them has to ever now.

”Robbe”, he says, and maybe Robbe should answer but he’s too busy listening, feeling him here.

“Robbe”, he tries again, and again, and then: “I lied”. 

Robbe freezes in confusion, still reticent to move. Whispers against the heat of Sander’s throat.

“What? When?”

Seconds pass and Sander says nothing, like he’s mustering the courage and isn’t that a thought, really, a thing Sander Driesen has to muster courage for.

“That day, back in school. I lied”, he starts, smiling, _closer_ _closer_ _closer_ until he’s speaking in his ear, so close that somehow Robbe can hear him, too, inside his head and without words. “I didn’t write about my parents, about practice. I didn’t write anything”.

"Sander—”, Robbe says, and holy shit the beating of his heart–

”Just, please. Please. Listen to me”, he says, eyes closed, leaning his head so they’re both touching foreheads. There’s a slight welcoming there, noses rubbing, and Robbe feels so much relief he could possibly cry. “Ninth grade, I think. Favorite thing in the world. I didn’t write anything”.

ididntwriteanythingididntwriteanything–

“But all I wanted to write about was you”.

It takes a second for it to sink in, but then. Then.

There’s nothing, no one, not even a thing that could get in the middle of Robbe reaching for Sander, closing the gap between their bodies until there’s no air and their lips collide in a kiss.

He has dreamt about this moment a thousand times but somehow it’s better, even with Sander’s arm in a cast and covered in sweat because it’s Sander’s lips hot against his, insistent and scalding and demanding and for once, for once in his life, Robbe is not afraid to take. He takes everything that Sander gives, lets his tongue slip in and demands more, and it’s rough at first but just like them, it slows down in the middle until they can only peck each other, and then it’s sickeningly sweet.

”Don’t leave again, please–”

”I won’t”, Sander says, pecks him again and every kiss is like heat pooling on his lips. It feels like a promise. “I won’t”.

Robbe laughs and kisses him again and can feel it then, time, frozen on the spot. And for a moment, there are no memories but this: Sander’s hand on his hair, warm and soft, lips bruising like they want to create heaven on earth, their own constellation of stars.


End file.
